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A Letter Home from Mir
News story originally written on May 27, 1998

The following is Andy Thomas's last letter to those on Earth. The subject -- a view from space...

As I have orbited around the Earth, I have spoken to many amateur radio
operators as well as television journalists conducting interviews. The
questions perhaps most frequently asked are "What is the view like from
space?" and "What can you see?" Over the course of the four months that
I have been on Mir, I have taken many opportunities to look out the
window and take photographs, and the view is captivating, both day and
night.

When you first look down on the Earth you see its obvious curvature, and
the thin layer of atmosphere on the horizon, with the dark blackness of
space above it. It is striking to see the abundance of clouds carpeting the
planet. Very seldom do we see extended areas that are free from cloud
cover, particularly in the tropics. We can see these clouds building to
thunderstorms during the day, and then collapsing at night back down to
Earth and spreading out in huge circles as if they had been poured down
onto the planet.

As you continue to watch the Earth, you begin to recognize land forms
and can see that some countries have broad features allowing them to be
recognized at a glance; northern Africa has its desert regions, south
America has its forested regions, and Australia its redness. Then there
are the characteristic coastlines that we are so accustomed to seeing on
a map that stand out very clearly from space; the boot shape of Italy, the
Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Florida peninsular, the gulf of California,
and so on. Finally, there are readily identifiable geographic features that
only occur in certain places: the huge expanse of Lake Baikal, the Namib
desert, the Himalayas bounding the plains of Tibet and the fertile areas of
India, and the Andes separating the rain forests from the western
deserts of South America. After even a short time in orbit, we learn to
recognize these and can quickly know our approximate position above the
Earth from a glance out the window.

Evidence of human habitation is visible from low Earth orbit. Cities can
be seen, although, surprisingly, they do not stand out readily. But we can
make out their grid-like patterns of streets. In remote areas, certain
roads and railway lines can be seen as faint lines across the Earth, such
as the road through the rain forests of Brazil, and the long straight
railway line crossing south western Australia, but generally these are
too small to make out clearly. The fencing off of farm land into individual
fields can also be made out, particularly in the Midwest of the U.S. and
Canada. There is even one area in South America where they alternate
their growing cycles on adjacent fields, giving rise to a very obvious
checkerboard pattern. Of course, national boundaries do not stand out by
themselves as on a map, but some national boundaries can be seen
where there are different land usage policies in effect on each side of a
border, giving rise to different surface texture or color. In this way the
southern border of Israel can be made out, as can part of the division
between the U.S. and Canada. The stories about the Great Wall of China
being visible form space may be true, but I have yet to see it.

One of the most readily visible signs of human presence, is the
occurrence of contrails from aircraft in the upper atmosphere. These are
crystals of ice formed from water, a byproduct of the combustion process
in the aircraft engines, and which is collected into the wake vortices of
the aircraft. They are very long lasting, and can be seen over virtually all
parts of the world as white streaks across the sky. They can be striking
around cities that are major air traffic hubs, and can often times be seen
radiating out from these cities, like spokes in a wheel.

The view of the Earth at night is equally spectacular, and cities can be
made out very clearly with all their street lights. Some areas stand out
very noticeably such as Japan, where the high population density is given
away by the abundance of night lights. In fact there are so many lights
you can delineate the shape of the Japanese island chain with ease. The
presence of myriad small points of light off shore, probably fishing boats,
shows Japan's heavy reliance on seafood.

There are a host of natural phenomena that are spectacular at night. In
the temperate zones, we can see vast thunderstorm fronts stretching for
miles and being lit up by huge flashes of lightning. Occasionally I have
seen lightning start at one point on a storm front and trigger a cascade of
lightning flashes propagating along the storm front, like a falling row of
dominoes.

Of course stars are visible at night, but without any atmospheric
attenuation, so they can be seen clearly. They look much as they do when
viewed from an isolated desert region away from city lights, but of course
they do not twinkle. Perhaps one of the most sublime of all the cosmic
sights I have seen to date is the Aurora Australis over the southern
polar regions. Only visible at night, it is an eerie curtain of pale green
phosphorescence that waves and twists above the Earth, stretching for
hundreds of miles.
Meteors are visible from space too. However, we have the unique
vantage of being able to look down on the Earth and see meteors
streaking into the atmosphere way below us. Having that perspective is
a compelling reminder that we are indeed flying in space.

Unfortunately, this orbital vantage also gives us a unique view of the
deleterious effects of human habitation. As I write this, there are huge
areas in Central America that are burning. A giant pall of smoke is
blanketing the entire south western peninsular of the North American
continent and is being carried in the winds over much of the United States
and as far north as Canada. Indeed, at the northern extreme of one of our
orbits, while crossing the Great Lakes, I could see the smoke haze
coming up from the distant south and blanketing the land below us. This
kind of perspective from space allows us to appreciate that all lands are
connected into a common biosphere and that the environmental policies in
one country have far reaching effects in other countries.

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